Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Yesterday, I posted a link to and comments on CSIS's excellent Mapping The Future project. That project sought to highlight events in the next 5 years that are both relatively certain to happen and should impact our world in varying but significant ways. At the same time, I mentioned that my own students had serendipitously done a similar exercise (only looking out 36 months, however) in my Intelligence Communications class. I divided that class into two teams with one team looking at future events from a geographic perspective and the other team looking at events from a topical (i.e. political, cultural, etc) perspective.

Today, I am posting the results from the geographical team's analysis. What you see below is their top findings (they actually covered a good many more events but I did not have time to type them up) for each of the regions. Note: The boldfaced items are items which were mentioned in both the CSIS report and in the geographical team's report. In addition to the region, the event and the date of the event, I have also included a brief version of their estimate regarding the most important outcome of that event. Obviously, I have tried to capture their bottomlines in the fewest words possible and, if I have failed in my attempt to summarize their findings, the fault is all mine.

The students were particularly taken with the degree to which China will likely be involved in many of these events. In fact, that was their overall finding: "Analysis of events within the next 36 months indicates that China's global power is highly likely to increase...While the economic interests are predominant, political and social elements also underlie these events."

The student's also produced a wall chart using I2's Analyst Notebook. You can download the file here but you will need to have either Analyst's Notebook or I2's free Chart Reader to view it.